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| Reader claims CAFOs pollute clean water following a flood |
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Dear Editor,
We all know about the oil spill in the Gulf and how BP is responsible for the massive clean-up. However, there’s another type of disaster that is equally threatening to the environment, which the media doesn’t pay too much attention: The hazards of flooding on all the manure that is washed off animal agriculture farms and spread over the countryside.
Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) raise thousands of poultry, pigs or cattle which produce enormous amounts of manure for which there is no federal guidelines that regulate how to treat, store or dispose of this waste. In many states, powerful lobbies and CAFO-friendly legislators block tough state regulations, so it’s usually piled up, left to rot in huge lagoons or spread over crop fields, which can contaminate ground water supplies because there’s far more manure than the land can absorb.
According to the EPA, (www.cfpub.epa.gov/ npdes/faqs.cfm) runoff from these farms pollutes our waterways which on occasion has caused fish kills and algae blooms and is the main reason why 60 percent (Editor’s note: This statistic is from the Farm Sanctuary website at www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/ environment) of America’s streams and rivers are considered “impaired.”
When it floods, all this waste is spread over the entire countryside which can cause human health problems to people hundreds of miles away from these facilities. And besides the manure problem, there is the issue of what CAFOs are allowed to do with the thousands of dead animals, that were left to drown in their confined housing.
CAFOs need to be held responsible for the environmental degradation they cause, so during the political campaigning this fall, ask the candidates, “Who will be responsible for cleaning up CAFO pollution?”
William Wilson
Jeffersonville, Ind. |
| 9/1/2010 |
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